American Freaks

Pushcart-Prize nominated autobiographical fiction

*A few notes:

1. This story was nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize in 2018; originally published in Concho River Review.

2. This story is paywalled. (Preview for free subscribers available.)

3. Please consider getting a paid subsciption to read this and many other locked posts, for only $35/year.

Photo by Griffin Taylor on Unsplash

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American Freaks

I stepped onto the bus in Seattle, downtown, my heavy pack finally off my shoulders for the first time all day, and I nodded to the driver, gray beard, blue marble eyes, the look of exhaustion, and I walked down the narrow corridor towards the end of the bus. I found a seat at the very end, sat, leaned my back against the old cloth, closed my eyes. I heard others scrambling onto the bus, taking Greyhound who knows where. I heard voices, low, murmured, people handing their tickets over to the driver, free of their luggage which now sat in the massive compartment beneath the seats of the bus, and I pictured the external metal of the bus, the blue straight lines, the running greyhound dog.

            When I opened my eyes I saw the doors closing. The bus was about half full. I liked this. The reek of stale piss, fermented beer, ancient sweat and cigarettes clung to the walls, hovered in the stifling air. The engine of the bus was loud and rumbling, constant. The bus driver, way, way up there, adjusted the giant rearview mirror, scratched his beard, mumbled something I could not catch, and then he swiveled a series of large gears and at last the pitch of the engine changed and the gigantic vehicle cleared its throat and we reversed, backing out of the downtown parking lot behind the Greyhound station on Royal Broughham Way. The bus lurched sluggishly along surface streets, hitting lights and waiting, going slow, allowing cars and trucks to pass. I gazed out the streaked, double-pane window and watched the people outside, walking, driving, meandering, living their real lives, in real distress, honking at each other, afraid, angry, confused.

            I had been traveling for two months, hitchhiking, driving, taking busses, staying here and there. I left San Francisco—my old apartment—back in early May and I didn’t even know where I was going or, really, why. I had this need for travel. Twenty-six years old and I’d been restless for years, since I’d been a teenager growing up in Southern California, since I’d been kicked out of Catholic high school. I could never keep a job more than six months, could never hold on to an apartment. Money was sporadic and inconsistent. Women? I wanted a real partner, a girlfriend, but I treated them all like objects, like whores, like filth. The worst part: I managed to find the ones who liked that. Or, at least they tolerated it, sickly enjoyed it, because the broken part of them inside was needy for it. It was what they knew. And the drinking. There was that.

            I woke up with a startle and a bump, the bus dark inside and the sounds of distant snores and coughs. I opened my eyes, yawned, gazed around, inhaled the thick air. I realized the bus was slowing. It stopped. I stood, gripping the seat top, then sprang down the narrow hallway, quiet, making sure not to wake anyone. Up ahead, I saw the bus driver checking something and then a woman, big-boned, big-breasted, rose from her seat and stepped in front of me a ways, lumbering awkwardly, walking down the aisle, nodding to the driver, and then stepped down the stairs to the street. We were parked at some rest stop.

            I halted at the bus driver. “Excuse me,” I said.

            He looked over at me, some papers in his lap which he’d been rifling through. I heard the loud click of the engine cooling outside, under the massive hood.

            “Yes?”

            “Where are we?” I asked.

            “Missoula.”

            “Montana?”

            He nodded.

            “Thanks.”

            He made no response. I walked down the three metal steps to the street. It was a park, green grass shining under the almost full moon, a bathroom building for both sexes, each on opposing sides, and some scattered trees. There were empty white-lined parking spots but the bus was parked parallel to the sidewalk, against those spaces.

            The woman was lighting a cigarette with a Zippo. I heard the clank noise as she shut the metal lid. I walked over. “Spare a smoke?”

            She smiled. I could see, in the light from the overhead street lamp, that she had strawberry blond hair, thick and somewhat curly, and a very smooth, tanned face. She wore a blue sweater which clung tight against her bulging breasts, curling out like some tidal wave. Below the sweater was a short skirt, beige, big and wide, fitting around her large belly. Certainly, she wasn’t thin. But sexy? Yes. Her eyes were cerulean blue, hiding some secret internal ocean of mystery. Or so I imagined.

            The woman reached into her thin-strapped purse, which was slung over her shoulder like a rifle in a war, extracted a cigarette from a pack of Kools, and handed it over. She picked out the Zippo from the depths and handed that over, too. I snatched it, flicked the lid, rolled the metal tumbler, stuck the end of the cigarette to the hot orange red, lit it, inhaled, blew out my nose, and handed her the Zippo back. She dropped it into the depths of her purse.

            “So,” I said. “Missoula.”

            She grinned, exhaled smoke, and said, “Yep.” Her voice was high and sexy, hick-ish in some way.

            “You know what time it is?” I drew deep on the cigarette, inhaled the tobacco hard into my lungs, held it, then blew out my nose.

            She reached into her blouse, her chubby hand, pink long fingernails, between her breasts, and brought out one of those flip cell phones. She snapped it open, gazed at it, then opened her blouse again and returned it. “It’s just past three in the morning.”

            “Jesus.” I’d slept for hours. When I’d fallen asleep, we’d been east of Seattle, and now we’d gone through the whole of Washington, through Idaho, and were more than halfway through Montana.

            Someone walked gingerly down the steps onto the sidewalk. I gazed over. It was some slender, deeply tanned, dark-haired Mexican, torn up blue jeans, a raggedy white T-shirt, five-o-clock shadow. Some of the people on the bus were truly down-and-out on their luck. Some were probably dirt poor. Some were illegal aliens who did agriculture work. Some might have been ex convicts, returning to society. Maybe a woman and her kids, escaping some abusive husband back in San Francisco or Portland or Seattle. Who knew. What was this woman’s story?

            “Where you heading?”

            I jerked my head. She’d cracked my reverie. I must have looked stunned or surprised because her eyes widened and she half laughed, almost a chuckle or a girlish giggle.

            “Denver,” I said.

            She drew on her smoke. “What’s in Denver?”

            I shrugged. I held my half-killed Kool between the middle and pointer finger in my right hand, which was lowered and by my side, against my thigh.

            “Nothing, really. I just want to go. Never been. I read a lot. Kerouac, particularly. His novel from 1957, On the Road: It blew my world open. In it, he and his buddy Dean go to Denver a lot, explore the jazz joints and bars on Larimer Street. I wanted to see it for myself.”

            She smiled and then the smile finally broke and crashed like some mammoth wave and she rolled her large head back, her big neck veiny and white, and she laughed at me.

            I swallowed. “What?”

            Her head slowly lifted, neck jacked upright, she jabbed the Kool between her lips, sucked, and said, “Denver sucks. Maybe it was cool back in the forties, when Sal and Dean did whatever it was they did, but not anymore.”

            “You’ve read it?”

            She shrugged, rolling her considerable shoulders. “Sure. I didn’t really like it. Wasn’t impressed. Seemed like shitty writing.”

            I must have bloomed red because she walked forward suddenly, dropped her smoke, crushed it between the heel of her battered Chuck Taylor heel, planted her palm on my shoulder, and, those intense, pulsing blue orbs gaping right into my eyes, she said, “Don’t take it personally.”

            Then she arrowed herself at the bus, and clicked up the steps and into the darkness of the thing, walking back to her seat. I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded. It was hot and humid and sticky out, early July, a few days after the fourth, and it must have still be seventy-five degrees out, even in the middle of the night. I couldn’t get the image of her face out of my mind, or the feel of her warm, sweaty palm on my shoulder, or how she’d pulled the phone from her bra, or how she’d flicked the Zippo, or how she’d insulted Kerouac.

            I inhaled once more, dropped the Kool, crushed it beneath my shoe, turned, and walked up the steps into the bus. I couldn’t see a thing, only the outline of the narrow aisle. I walked slowly, unsure. I didn’t see her. But I sensed her. I kept walking. I wanted to stop, search, find her, but I kept walking.

            In Billings, Montana, we dipped south on I-90 and then in Buffalo we connected to I-25. We lumbered south through Wyoming. It was in Casper, a little more than halfway through Wyoming, that it happened. It was the same day, technically, as when we’d stopped at that rest area. Only now it was seven in the evening. We’d been sitting on the bus, slowly lurching, all day, cars passing us on the freeway, eighteen-wheeler trucks passing us, everyone gaping up at us through their windows, as if we were American freaks, as if we were the low-down scum of the Earth.

            Casper, Wyoming, was a major stop. It was a transfer point. Which meant we’d stop and some would get off, transferring onto other Greyhound buses which would take them to other parts of the country. And new people would get on. Half hour stop. We could go into the Greyhound station, buy a soda and snacks, smoke. All morning and day we’d rolled through the barren, mountainous landscape of Montana and then through Wyoming. It had been gloriously empty and spacious, few people compared to sunny, overcrowded California. I’d looked out the thick window, watching the landscape pass by, watching the freeways and the cars, watching the trucks, thinking, not thinking, sometimes reading the dog-eared, battered paperback Denis Johnson novel I’d brought: His first novel, “Angels.” It was about a woman and her kids who flees an abusive husband and meets a man named Bill on a Greyhound bus. Everything changes.